The plaintiffs lawyers, led by Robbins Geller Rudman & Dowd, had asked for $790,000 for getting additional disclosures for shareholders in a failed tender offer. Wrote Delaware vice-chancellor J. Travis Laster: "Plaintiffs never engaged in meaningful litigation activity." But they still got $75,000.

The ruling overturns a controversial decision that permitted an Air Products-sponsored shareholder amendment to push the Airgas annual meeting up by eight months. The amendment would have permitted Air Products to gain control of the Airgas board--but the Supreme Court found it invalid.

Did Alcatel and Lucent, before their merger, scheme to divert valuable Lucent patents to a Delaware trust in order to sidestep Alcatel's obligation to share certain patents with companies like Microsoft and Dell? Starting Monday, that question will be before a Delaware Chancery court in a trial that will be streamed live on the Web by the Courtroom View Network.

The bondholders, represented by Kasowitz, Benson, Torres & Friedman, maintain that an affiliate of Tribune Co. has been improperly paying the legal fees of banks that loaned money to Tribune for its LBO.

Third-party litigation funding may be the new, new thing, but there are some unforeseen kinks. In a patent case against Facebook, a federal judge has ordered the plaintiff to turn over documents to Facebook's lawyers, ruling that if litigation funders saw the documents, they're not protected by privilege.

A Delaware Chancery Court judge sanctioned hedge fund pioneer Michael Steinhardt on Friday, finding that he traded on non-public information as a named plaintiff in a shareholder class action that sought to block a merger between telecom companies Occam Networks and Calix Inc.